This is a guest post from Mike Taber. Mike is a Boston area entrepreneur who is the founder of Moon River Software, Moon River Consulting, and co-founder of the Micropreneur Academy. He blogs semi-sporadically at SingleFounder.com and is currently working on AuditShark, a security product designed to provide awareness of the security posture of your servers.

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Last year at the Business of Software conference, I found myself in several conversations where I was either asking for an opinion on one of my ideas or giving an opinion on someone else’s. I thought I was being a good conference attendee. I thought I was offering people a different perspective and expanding the number of approaches they could use to achieve their goals. I thought I was helping people. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Telling people what you think of their ideas is a terrible thing to do at a conference. It’s not helpful. In fact, unless you’re their target market and they’re pitching you on their product, you’re probably only hurting people when you give them your opinion.

The problem with offering an opinion is that it doesn’t solve a problem. What we think is irrelevant. What our peers think also tends to be irrelevant. What matters is whether an approach to solving a problem works or not. You get that from asking your customers questions. You get that from testing peoples’ behaviors. You get that from analyzing quantifiable metrics. You don’t get it from opinions.

There’s a fine line that needs to be walked between offering an opinion and providing alternative approaches to solving a problem. It’s the difference between “Have you thought about trying X” vs “I think you should do A because X, Y and Z”. This first provides you an additional approach to try out while the second tries to analyze which is better. The opinionated approach works when someone is in unfamiliar territory. It falls apart when two solutions are both on the right path and you’re trying to decide which is “better”, whatever that might be.

As entrepreneurs, we face problems all day, every day. We want to find solutions. We want to solve these problems so we can move on to the next problem. Debating whether to do X or Y simply isn’t helpful. Neither is debating which is better.

We need to determine how to test these ideas so that we can measure how effectively they’re solving our problems. We also need to be able to measure the solutions against one another. If you can’t quantify the results, it’s impossible to justify one solution over another. At that point, you might as well flip a coin. And I’m not personally fond of letting a coin flip dictate my future success.

One way to effectively solicit help at BOS is to rephrase your questions to people. Instead of asking what someone thinks of your idea, tell them what your idea is and what your underlying hypothesis is. Then ask how they would test it to see if it’s the correct approach because it turns out that testing your ideas is a crucial part of the learning process. You can substitute just the word “learning” with nearly any aspect of your business and it still holds true, whether that word becomes marketing, sales, software development, customer development, etc. This leads to the conclusion that it’s not that testing ideas that is important, but that testing in general is important. I think we all get that.

But the problem is that we’re not doing it. More importantly, when we’re meeting up at conferences to learn from others, we spend our time explaining our ideas and asking what people think in a futile attempt to pick out the best idea, presumably so we’re not wasting time on the second and third best options. As I said, what we think is generally irrelevant. It’s the reality of the situations that is important and until we test those ideas, we have no way to prove or disprove our ideas. In fact, it’s on that very basis that many companies get funded or don’t get funded.

“No customers yet? Here’s a pile of money.”

“You’ve been live for six months and have ten customers? Let’s talk later when you’ve got more interest from other people who are interested in giving you money because let’s be honest. I’m a herd animal.”

We laugh at that for the same reason we laugh at Dilbert. It’s not funny because it’s funny. It’s funny because it’s true. In the face of uncertainty, you must have the ability to quantify results if you’re going to optimize your efforts for success. Picking the second or third best way to do something will usually still get you where you need to go. But sometimes it won’t. And if there’s a better way to do something, you need to know about it.

Let’s try to solve this problem. Here’s a thought experiment to try out at the Business of Software conference this year.

The next time you hear someone asking what you think of their idea, don’t tell them. Instead, determine their underlying hypothesis and discuss how they can quickly test the accuracy of that hypothesis. It is only through testing our hypotheses that we will learn what does and doesn’t work for our own businesses because every business is different.

See you at BOS.

This is a guest post from Alex Yumashev. Alex is a founder of Jitbit – a UK-based self-funded startup with a suite of customer support oriented products. You can find his blog at blog.jitbit.com and meet him at the Business of Software 2012 this October.

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Does this sound familiar?

“Innovate!”

“Differentiate!”

“Revolutionize!”

“Disrupt!”

“Shake things up!”

“Don’t be a “me too” product!”

You keep hearing this from all the industry gurus – Paul Graham, Jason Fried, Hiten Shah, DHH and many others. You keep reading this in fine startup blogs and in HackerNews discussions. You keep hearing this at conferences. “Don’t be a me-too product”. This has become a mantra. But, you know what?

“Me-too” products are just fine.

In fact, starting with a “me-too” product as your first product – is the preferable way to go. I hate to break this to you, but your first “innovative” idea will most likely fail. Your second “revolutionary” idea will fail as well. Just like the third one. In fact, almost all the famously successful people have failed at first. Including Bill Gates (two failed businesses before Microsoft), Walt Disney (fired from a newspaper as a “mediocre artist”), Soichiro Honda (yes, that Honda, was fired from Toyota), Henry Ford, James Dyson, etc. Overnight success is an exception, not a rule. For every “Angry Birds” there are thousands of game studios who never made it.

Your first me-too product, on the other hand, might turn out pretty good.

Innovation is glamorous. We love to hear stories about two guys making a fortune by inventing something completely new in a garage. But don’t chase the “innovation”. Chase the customer needs instead. With an “innovative” app you are tempted to fall in love with your idea. And take the “idea-first” road, instead of the “market-first” approach, where a “me too” concept becomes perfectly acceptable, as the market is proven to be right there.

You need competition

“The big problem with avoiding competition is that you are also avoiding customers.” – Erik Sink.

Don’t drop an idea as soon as you find out somebody else is already doing it. This is actually a good sign. In fact, no competition is nothing but a sign of an empty niche.

So if you feel you can create a product in a crowded niche you are familiar with, and you can make it even slightly better than the existing ones – go for it. In fact, it’s even easier to innovate in crowded niches, because you have reference points, weaknesses and strength right under your nose. There are more chances to disrupt an existing niche then to create a brand new niche.

70% of my company revenue comes from me-too products. When we first launched our Macro Recorder five years ago there were seven other titles on the market. But making the first couple of bucks out of it inspired us so much, that we rushed into polishing and improving the tool, adding more determinant features that eventually made us the leader in the niche. By the way, becoming a leader is not even required: another flagship product of ours – the web-based help desk app – has never made it to the top of Google search but it still generates half of our company’s revenue. There’s enough space for everyone.

We do experiment with “revolutionary” products as well – a media-streaming service, social apps, we even wrote a plugin for Spotify just for kicks… And trust me, it’s much easier to launch the “innovative” stuff when you already have a “me-too” product background. You already know how to do SEO, how to accept online payments, how to do marketing, how to manage your team and many other. Learning all these things is easier with a “me-too”.

Same guidelines & tools

Turns out, all the startup concepts apply to “me-toos” just fine. Releasing an MVP (“minimum viable product”) soon enough to gather some initial feedback – works great. The “build-measure-learn” cycle concept (from the Lean Startup approach) also works like a charm. “Fail fast”, “be data-driven” – all these apply beautifully. And don’t forget, with a “me-too” product you can also measure/learn from your competitors as well! Sometimes publicly available data points out some cool stuff you can learn from. Or – weaknesses you can beat.

So it’s OK to be a me-too. Disrupting crowded niches is not that hard. Forget the stereotype and go for it. Even Google was a “me-too” product at first.

This is a guest post from Joca Torres. Joca is the director of product development and product management at Locaweb, Brazil’s leader in web hosting, cloud servers and SaaS applications like email marketing and online stores, serving more than 250,000 customers. His first startup experience was in the early 1990s when he founded and ran one of the first Brazilian ISPs. He has been working with internet related software ever since.

Joca is also the author of The Startup Guide: how startups and established companies can create and manage profitable web products. The book is in Portuguese, but Joca has been kind enough to translate a few sections of it for us. Joca also posted all of the book’s content on the “Guia da Startup” blog (in Portuguese).

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The conversion funnel explained in my previous post consists of a short term data set since within a few days or even hours, you can already see trends, draw conclusions, create hypotheses and validate these hypotheses, whether talking to your users, whether experimenting and measuring the results.

In addition to these short-term data, there are other data that take longer to stabilize and to show trends. The fact that they take longer to show trends doesn’t mean that you should not monitor them during the first months of your web product. These are the long-term numbers, which can be classified as global numbers (revenue and costs) and individual numbers (CAC, LT and LTV).

Global numbers: revenue and costs

Revenue is the money that you get when people use your product. There are some ways to obtain revenue from your web product:

• Revenue paid by the user: used by web products such as Google AdWords, MailChimp, Zendesk, Salesforce.com and others. In this case the revenue comes from periodic payment. Another quite common payment option is pay per use. Revenue paid by the user is more usual in B2B products. According to a tweet by Brian Walter, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester for eCom & multichannel tech, only 7% of software revenue in the US comes from sales to consumers, 93% is from sales to businesses and the government. Some examples of web product with revenue paid by the final consumer are LinkedIn and ContaCal.
• Revenue paid by someone interested in your users: in this case someone who is interested in talking to your user pays you to do that. This model is widely used for web products used by consumers. Usually the business model is to sell advertising. One example is Google that allows anyone to use the search and charges companies to advertise in the search results. Another similar example is Facebook, which also offers free access to users and charges companies interested in doing advertising to Facebook users. Another source of revenue is selling usage reports to companies interested in knowing the behavior of your users. Note that in order to be interesting for someone to the point that this someone is willing to pay to access your user, you must have a very large amount of users who return often to use your product.
• Indirect Revenue:this is the revenue you get as a result of using the software, but that is not paid to use the software. There are basically two types of indirect revenue:
  • Revenue from sale or rental of physical or virtual items: this is the case of online stores that use the web to sell or rent physical items. Amazon and Netflix are good examples. There are also stores that sell or rent virtual items such as Netflix streaming service or Amazon’s Kindle books. Note that e-commerce sites that are brokering the sale of physical items such as eBay are not of this kind. They are the type in which the revenue is paid by the user of the web product in a pay per use mode, since in this scenario the seller pays the broker site a commission on the sale.
  • Cost Reduction: the case of internet banking, high school or college intranet, portal to access to results of clinical exams and other systems that do not sell anything or charge for access. In this type of product there is no revenue, but cost reduction. The internet banking reduces the cost of physical customer care. Intranet high school or college allows a faster flow of communication between school and student or student’s parents, saving on visits and meetings. Access to clinical exams results via the internet reduces costs of other forms of delivery of the test results, such as printing and mailing.

This revenue will be used to pay your costs. Once you are able to pay your monthly costs, the surplus will be used to offset the investment made during those months when the monthly income did not cover the monthly costs. Both revenues and costs should be checked every month. It’s a good idea to classify your costs in some categories to help you understand where you’re spending more and where you can save. I usually classify costs into four categories:

• Infrastructure: all costs necessary to keep the service running. In this category I include the cost of website hosting and application, domain registration, email marketing tools, SEO tools, A/B testing tools, online chat and so on. Usually the expenses are recurring and thus require much attention whenever you hire a new service in this category.
• development: here are all the costs to develop and implement new features on the website and the product, including programming, interface development, visual design and logo design. If you’re a developer, chances are you can save here.
• marketing: every investment that you do to attract customers, such as AdWords, Facebook ads, ads on websites, magazines, newspapers and TV. We must also include costs with printing and distribution of flyers, coupons, and brochures. At first you probably need investment here, but it is important to invest time in free ways to attract customers such as SEO, content generation and social recommendation.
• domain expertise: is the investment that you make to create and improve your product on its topic. For example, if you’re working on a web accounting product, it is important to have knowledge on this topic. If it’s a system for doctors, you have to know a bit of this world. In the case of ContaCal, I needed help from people who understand food and nutrition.

Obviously, to have a profitable product you need to have monthly revenue greater than the monthly costs. In ContaCal I’m still chasing that, but I’m getting closer to monthly profitability:

Here’s the translated column names in the same order they appear above:

• Costs
• marketing costs
• infrastructure costs
• development costs
• domain expertise costs
• Revenue
• Result

Individual numbers: CAC, LT and LTV

The revenue and cost are indicators of the overall health of your web product. However, it is important to have individual indicators, i.e., indicators by each customer. There are three individual indicators that are important:

• CAC: is the Customer Acquisition Cost. It is the sum of the costs associated with finding and getting the attention of potential customers, bringing them to your site, converting them to users of your product and later to a paid customers.
• LT: the lifetime of your customer, i.e., how long on average your customer stays your customer. This number only makes sense when you have a recurring revenue business model.
• LTV: is the lifetime value, the value of a customer for as long as she remains your customer. It’s the revenue generated by your customer during her LT.

From the above definitions it is easy to see that your product will be profitable when you have high LT and LTV and low CAC. What you need is an LTV greater than CAC. Something I’m working hard to get in ContaCal:

Here’s the translated column names in the same order they appear above:

• New trials
• New paying customers
• Remaining paying customers
• LT
• LTV
• Trial CAC
• Paying customer CAC

What you can see above is that LT is increasing, i.e., the oldest the customer, the greater is her LT. At the beginning of operations data change a lot, after a month in the life of your product LT can only be a maximum of one month or slightly more if you charge 3, 6 or 12 months in advance. However, it is important to monitor these indicators since the beginning of its operation. ContaCal has only six full months of operation as a fee based system. These data tend to stabilize at around 2 years of operation.

Next steps

Now that we discussed a bit about short and long-term numbers that give us some insight our web product, one question that everyone who starts a new venture has is how long does it take to start having results of this endeavor.

Join Mikey Trafton, CEO of Fire Ant Software to hear why culture matters in business and some great tips for ensuring the people you hire will support the culture you want to create and sustain.

• Got questions about Mikey’s blog on hiring for cultural fit and what culture means for your business?
• Got some interview tips you want to share?
• Want to know what Mikey is going to talk about at Business of Software – or make some suggestions for topics you would like see covered?

We’re delighted to let you know we have one final speaker to add to the Business of Software Conference line up this year. Peter Bauer is a serial entrepreneur and CEO/Founder of Mimecast. He has led the company since inception to become a world leader in email management software. He has experienced his fair share of bumps and bruises along the way and we think that his story will be interesting, actionable and insightful – a perfect fit for Business of Software then.

In his talk, Founding Principles vs. Scaling Principles, Peter will share the lessons he learned in founding and building Mimecast into an organization that now employs 330 people (and counting), 6,000 customers (and counting), $50 million revenue (and counting). His role in the organization has changed significantly over time. Peter will discuss some fundamental ways his role as a founder/leader has evolved in this journey and the major differences between the Founding Principles of the business and the Scaling Principles.

Thanks for agreeing to speak Peter, welcome aboard.

Congratulations to the successful Lightning Talk applicants this year:

• Jody Burgess, Tribbon: Living Fearlessly
• Brock Armstrong, Frozen Puck: How Our Jobs Are Killing Us and What We Can Do About It – Fitness for Software Nerds
• Des Traynor, Intercom.io: They’re all Just Perspectives
• Joel Worrall, CURE International: Be Smart, Get Things Done, and Change the World
• Greg Menvielle, Pyramedium: Improve People’s Lives – You Have 20 Years

We had over 50 entries for Lightning Talks this year. Reviewing that many could have been a chore – in any sort of competition like this, the quality spread can be, errm, ‘variable’. As we went through them, it became clear that we had another problem – there were too many really promising entries to make easy decisions.

We have selected 5 of the final Lightning Talk speakers to speak (the effort some people put into their applications was incredible) but have also selected some of the others to participate in a Lightning Talk ‘bake-off on the first day of the conference. This will be coordinated by two time Lightning Talk veteran Patrick Foley – thank Patrick.

Those speakers will be delivering their talk, privately, in front of each other and will then select a speaker to make their Lightning Talk in front of the full audience on Tuesday.

Thank you to everyone who entered. Some great ideas, some creative approaches, it was a tough call. See you in October.

This is a very inspirational guest post from Ameet Shah. Ameet is the founder of Conigent, a service based company. In this guest post Ameet shares with us his story of how he turned his first product based company to a wild success based on what he learned from Business of Software 2011.

Thanks for sharing such an inspirational story with us, Ameet!

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Throughout my career, I got to work on some great projects with some really smart people. But it always frustrated me to have exciting software ideas, but not have the software development knowledge to implement them myself… especially as I saw plenty of other people moving ahead with them. So I would look for a “perfect” technology partner to work with, but let’s face it, no developers worth their salt want a “partnership” where they do all of the work while someone else “comes up with ideas.”

In 2011, things changed for me.

A friend of mine suggested that I attend BoS 2011. The conference itself was absolutely amazing! At the same time, I felt a bit out of place. It seemed like I was the only person there without a product of their own. For the last five years, I have been running a services company (Conigent), but I still lacked software development experience. On the plane ride home, I promised myself that I was going to figure out a way to make a software product. I really wanted to know what it was like to turn an idea into a product!

About a month before the conference, I had started doing CrossFit workouts, and I absolutely loved them. There are various applications out there to track performance, but none of the ones I had used were very good. After some thought, I decided that I could do better, and committed myself to making a great CrossFit performance tracking application, regardless of profit or loss, just to feel what the other BoS attendees were talking about.

I started to take a look at how other folks made software, and I got my start at the end of the year, spending the time between Christmas and New Year’s Eve mocking up what was to become Wodify in Balsamiq. But Balsamiq mockups are easy to make in comparison to actually developing and marketing an application. I looked around at the software development systems out there, and settled on OutSystem’s Agile Platform. While it was not free or even inexpensive, and it was really aimed at enterprise development environments, it had something I couldn’t find elsewhere: it gave someone like me the ability to get an application off the ground. The system is just a completely different, unique development environment that allows technical people who are not developers to get some work done, and experienced developers to work much better. At the end of January, I took the top-flight training class from OutSystems, and less than a month later Wodify was live at a beta site in New Jersey.

The next few months flew by… in the second week or March the mobile app was ready, and before the end of March we had demo’ed a feature complete, branded version at the CrossFit Northeast Regionals at the Reebok HQ. In early June, Reebok got in touch with us and we did a demo at CrossFit One, a CrossFit gym that world class athletes go to. Reebok showed great interest in working closely together with us on Wodify. By mid-July, we took Wodify on the road to have a booth at the CrossFit Games, the annual global event. As of now, we have nearly 300 CrossFit gyms (out of the 4,000 across the globe) in our sales pipeline and have hired an elite athlete to be a product evangelist. Reebok is getting ready go to live with Wodify in about three weeks, and from there we will find out how we can partner with Reebok. Our target is for Wodify to see $5 million annually in SaaS revenue.

I went from not being able to program and working by myself to figure it out to having a viable product, a growing team, and booming opportunities. I started Wodify not expecting a profit and now it is on track to make more than I thought possible. Our customers love our product and report nearly 100% adoption by members where competing products do not get nearly that kind of use. are And best of all? Coming into BoS 2012, I am going to be showing up with the full team with a successful product this time around. There was no way that I could have come this far this quickly without BoS 2011 lighting a fire underneath me.

This is a guest post from Joca Torres. Joca is the director of product development and product management at Locaweb, Brazil’s leader in web hosting, cloud servers and SaaS applications like email marketing and online stores, serving more than 250,000 customers. His first startup experience was in the early 1990s when he founded and ran one of the first Brazilian ISPs. He has been working with internet related software ever since.

Joca is also the author of The Startup Guide: how startups and established companies can create and manage profitable web products. The book is in Portuguese, but Joca has been kind enough to translate a few sections of it for us. This is Joca’s fourth guest post in this series. Joca also posted all of the book’s content on the “Guia da Startup” blog (in Portuguese).

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During David Cancel’s 2011 “Data Driven Business” he mentioned how important it is to know your numbers. He even mentioned that “In Data We Trust” paraphrasing US official motto “In God we trust”. His talk inspired some chapters of my book “The Startup Guide” (in Portuguese) that I’ll translate below.

What data is important?

All data is important, but depending on what you’re looking to understand, certain data is more important than other. Knowing your data is an ongoing task as each new knowledge you acquire from data will motivate new questions that will need more data or a different perspective on the existing data to be answered.

The first information that you will want to know is how many visits you receive on your product web site. To know these numbers you can use some statistics report included in the hosting package of your hosting provider. Another option is the well known Google Analytics.

With a report like this you get some important information such as number of visits, number of unique visitors, page views and much more. Depending on the system that you are using, you may also see the first and last pages visited during an access to your site, which country and city your visitors come from, if your visitors have accessed your site coming from a campaign you are running on Google AdWords, Facebook or somewhere else, or if they found your site organically, or by directly typing the address, or searching for something in a search engine. It is important to remember that you should have reports not only for your web site but also for your web application.

But be careful! These report systems normally provide a huge amount of information and it is easy to get lost in this sea of data.

Along with the amount of views and hits your site has, there are other important data that you need to know about your web product:

• Number of people who learn that your web product exists: It is possible to differentiate the ways people learn that your web product exists classifying them into two categories, paid and organic. Paid are those people who learn about the existence of your web product because you have invested some money to inform them. You can invest money in Google AdWords, Facebook ads, ads on content sites, preferably sites with content related to the subject of your web product, magazine ads, also preferably magazines related to the subject of your web product. On the other hand, organic are those people who learn about the existence of your web product because you have invested time and effort to become known by creating relevant content on the topic of your site, interacting on blogs that talks about the topic of your product, making it easier for people to recommend your product to their friends and so on. The return in this case takes longer, but has the advantage of having no financial cost.
• Number of clicks generated by your ads or by other means: this information is a little bit more difficult to obtain because depending on your strategy to attract people to your site, this information is not available. The online ad systems like Google AdWords, Facebook and ads on content sites usually have this information available and the price they charge you is normally based on a price per click.
• Number of unique visitors: this is the number of new visitors your site receives. It is different from the number of visits since the same person can visit your site more than once before deciding to buy or to become a user.
• Number of visitors who become users: from the total of unique visitors, some will become a user of your system. If you offer a free trial or free version without an expiration date, this number may be fairly large.
• Number of users who become customers: at the end of the trial period, some of your users will want to become a customer by paying to continue to use your service. If you’re offering a free version of your product, with no expiration date, you must have a paid version that will encourage your users to upgrade from the free version to this paid version.
• Number of users and customers who cancelled: some users and customers may decide to no longer be your user or customer. It is important to know how many and the reasons why this happens since this information will provide you a lot of information to improve your web product.

Conversion funnel

Napoleon Bonaparte, French military and political leader known by the Napoleonic Wars, through which he was responsible for establishing the French hegemony over most of Europe in the early nineteenth century, had a major defeat in 1812, the Invasion of Russia. This invasion was a huge military operation brought by the French and their allies who had a major impact on the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars, marking the beginning of the decline of the First French Empire. In this invasion Napoleon used 580,000 combatants. Of these, only 22,000 survived, the rest perished on the way from France to Moscow due to difficulties such as cold, rain, rivers, and other natural and man generated obstacles.

This image resembles a conversion funnel of a web site that can be done with the data discussed above. The conversion funnel shows us how we’re losing potential customers in the way of attracting people to the site to the point where a person pays to become your customer:

The conversion funnel helps us see where we must work to get more paying customers. For a “data geek”, this should be the primary focus in terms of data to be obtained and analyzed. Each piece of this funnel requires a different type of action to be enlarged.

Example funnel

ContaCal is a web product I created in 2011 during nights and weekends with no connection with my day job in order to experiment with building a startup using the most recent methodologies and best practices. ContaCal is a calorie counter system with a twist. Besides telling you the amount of calories you’ve ingested it also tells you the quality of these calories. If you want to read more about it, you can read my previous posts. Below is an example of a conversion funnel based on ContaCal’s data.

Sorry for the Portuguese, but here’s the translated column names in the same order they appear above:

• clicks
• unique visitors
• unique visitors per clicks
• users
• users per unique visitor
• paying customers
• paying customers per users
• cancelled paying customers
• cancelled paying customers per paying customers

Note that this is a monthly funnel. It is important that you also have a daily funnel so you can measure everyday the impact of changes and experiences that you do to enlarge the funnel.

Below is another example of ContaCal’s daily funnel showing the daily cohort of users to paying customers. Cohort, as defined in Wikipedia, is a group of subjects who have shared a particular event together during a particular time span. I have a 5 day trial period, enough to test ContaCal, so I measure what happens with users since signup until the 5th day:

Again, sorry for the Portuguese, but here’s the translated column names in the same order they appear above:

• date
• # users
• # used in first day
• # used in second day
• # used in third day
• # used in fourth day
• # used in fifth day
• # became a paying customers

Next steps

In my next post I will talk about the long-term numbers we also have to track.

We’re delighted the good folks at Avangate, long-time attendees at Business of Software, have offered to fund 5 places to the Business of Software, October 1-3rd in Boston for people that otherwise wouldn’t be able to make it. We look forward to meeting the winners of the Avangate Scholarships and to learning what the future of our industry hold for us all. They will also be supporting the LiveStream this year so the good news is that we will be beaming some of our BoS goodness round the world. Thank you Avangate.

We appreciate your support and I know you are going to make some people very happy. Here is how you can apply to come as a guest of Avangate:

Apply by September 4th 2012 and tell us:

• Provider of SaaS, on-premise ESD or hybrid models.
• Embrace innovative technologies and business models.
• Bonus on showcasing innovative use of connecting with their end customers, whether direct or via channels.

The winning applicants will receive: a guest pass to Business of Software (please note you will still be required to cover your own travel and accommodation costs), three months of expert online marketing and commerce consulting to help them grow their businesses and be invited to attend a dinner hosted by Avangate on the Tuesday evening along with some of the other BoS attendees.

Avangate is an advanced eCommerce provider that enables software and Software-as-a-Service companies to sell their products via any channel and any model with a view to optimizing both online and offline revenue. Specifically designed for the software vertical, Avangate’s scalable SkyCommerce™ solution includes a full-featured secure eCommerce platform, a partner order and revenue management system as well as a worldwide affiliate network. Avangate’s expertise in the software business helps vendors increase product visibility on the Internet, maximize access to additional selling channels and improve overall software revenue. More information can be found on www.avangate.com

Apply here by September 4th 2012.

Please note that in keeping with out standard terms, we will not sell or pass on your contact details to a third party though if you are a successful applicant Avangate will need to contact you to arrange your ticket and dinner invitation. Please also note that only unregistered attendees may apply for a ticket though an additional team member may apply .

Apply here by September 4th 2012.

Joel Spolsky, (Stack Exchange, Fog Creek Software), Seth Godin, Scott Farquhar (Atlassian) and other Business of Software attendees tell us why Business of Software is a must attend event for software entrepreneurs.

Cheers John Knox, Founder of Moving Average, long time attendee at Business of Software and a guy that cares a lot about helping people, especially engineers, to have great careers in great software businesses – he even wrote a book about it.

John has offered to fund Business of Software Scholarships for a couple of students/recent graduates who would not otherwise be able to attend the Business of Software Conference in October so they can meet great people and be encouraged to spend a career building great software businesses. John is particularly keen to hear from people who would not be able to attend in any other circumstances.

Thank you John!

John Knox at Business of Software by the lovely Betsy Weber.

Here’s how to apply.

Register your contact details and tell us why you would like to attend and what you would bring to the conversation by August 31st 2012. John will pick two scholars and the chosen ones will get to go as his guest. Not only is he an extraordinarily generous, thoughtful, guy, he knows just about everyone there so this is like getting a VIP pass.

If anyone wants to support the growth of the software industry by offering a helping hand to others, we’re always happy to hear from you.

APPLY FOR STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP HERE, APPLY NOW. Closes August 31st 2012.

Guest post by Jeff Gibson, Intercept Solutions.

My history with the Business of Software conference goes back to 2009, when it was held out in San Francisco. I’ve been coming ever since. The first two years were relatively quiet. I got to meet some great people. Got to hear some amazing speakers and learn a lot of new information on the best way to start software companies.

As I was getting ready to register for the conference last year, I caught a tweet mentioning that Mark wanted to put a band together to play at the conference. Now mind you, not only have I been developing software for 30 years, but I’ve also been a musician since I was in elementary school. So seeing this tweet definitely got my interest up.

I sent an email to Mark telling him that I was a musician and would love be a part of it. In our conversation I brought up the fact that the band I was in had just played a week at Epcot Center in Orlando Florida. Little did I know that by bringing that up, I was about to be the go to guy for the band he wanted to put together. The next thing I knew, I was staring at 14 email addresses belonging to musicians from all around the globe that wanted to participate in the band. I knew things were about to get VERY interesting!

Honestly, the whole thing confirmed my assumption that technology individuals make up some of the best musicians out there!

Needless to say, Mark is on a mission from God, and wants to put the band back together for BOS2012!!

Business of Software 2011 Band – Whiskey Priest, Boston, MA

So the “Call for Musicians” is out. If you’re coming to the Business of Software Conference 2012 and you play an instrument, sing (or both). Send me an email with your contact info to jgibson@interceptsolutions.com. I would love to talk with you about what we’re doing.

[Mark says: JFDI! Please let Jeff know as soon as possible if you want to take part. The band was brilliant last year though not everyone can make it back. The venue we have selected for the party on Monday night is probably even better suited to an evening of singalong AND quiet networking. There are two distinct and separate spaces so if you want to come and talk quietly with your fellow attendees, you can do so happily even as upstairs in a separate area some of us will be tapping our feet and singing along to some wicked tunes.]

A follow up on our Startup two for one offer at Business of Software. We did say we would try to match founders who wanted to take advantage but here is an easier way. Here’s the deal for single startup founders – save 50%.

If you’re a single founder and want to grow a great software business, we would love you to come to:

“The best conference of the year”, (Tobi Lutke, CEO, Shopify)

Don’t take our (Or Tobi’s) word for it though… Jason Cohen, (Smart Bear Software and WP Engine) says:

“If you’re a serious software entrepreneur in any stage, it will change your life to attend Business of Software: businessofsoftware.org“

Dharmesh Shah, CTO & Founder, Hubspot calls it,

“My favorite Conference”

Joel Spolsky, CEO, Fog Creek & Stack Exchange

“Every speaker is a keynote quality speaker… What you are learning is how to make a product that is useful in the world.”

And here is ALL the feedback from last year… And who’s coming to Business of Software this year?.

So, if you want to come, and can’t take advantage of the Business of Software Startup BOGOF – either because you are a single founder or you you don’t think you can afford to send two founders out of the office/bedroom/Starbucks/incubator/AOL (we love that story), the price just, ‘feels too much right now’ and you don’t know if it will be ‘value right now’, or whatever…

If you are a startup founder, you can attend Business of Software at a 50% discount to the current price – prices rise as we get closer to the event.

We have 20 places available.

You qualify if you:

• Are attending Business of Software for the first time.
• Have been incorporated since October 1st 2011.
• Really want to join our amazing community of software people.
• Are FULLY committed to the startup – it must be your primary job – not a side project, a full-on, full-time gig.

Click straight to the DISCOUNT Price – or use the CODE: Startup50 when you register.

If you have any doubt about whether you meet the criteria to qualify, please contact us directly to check.

Thank you for a record number of Lightning Talk Submissions. Over 40 in total with videos so we have some work to do to go through them all and work out how they fit into the overall programme. Thank you!

While we enjoy those, enjoy the Winning Lightning Talk from Business of Software 2011. Justin Goere’s, ‘Getting to Nowhere’.

We will try to notify everyone that submitted a talk by the end of this week and at that point publish the schedule for the conference.

I stumbled across an old hard drive the other day, and rewatched Jennifer Aaker‘s talk from Business of Software 2009. Jennifer is a professor at Stanford GSB, and co-author of the excellent Dragonfly Effect book (if you care about how you can use social media to propel social change, you should buy a copy from Amazon – it’s excellent).

It was a fascinating talk in which Jennifer talked about her work mining data and using statistical methods to reach conclusions about what makes people happy. Jennifer has kindly agreed that I can post a handful of excerpts here.

In this first clip, Jennifer talks about building strong brands inside out: how really strong brands understand what they mean to themselves and how this is reflected outwards.

http://blip.tv/play/hatwgv77YQA

In this second clip, Jennifer talks about the importance of volunteering.

http://blip.tv/play/hatwgv77XQA

In this final clip , Jennifer talks about what small steps you can take, tomorrow, to increase your effectiveness and meaningfulness in your work and life.

http://blip.tv/play/hatwgv77XwA

You can find out more about Jennifer on her web site, or follow her on twitter.

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